Tuesday, April 8, 2014

The banana is such a versatile fruit, our family never gets tired of it. In fact the first food that all my babies set their first tooth on is mashed bananas, so it is no wonder that I have a hard time hiding my ripe bananas for making this special Rice Cooker Caramel Banana Cake (or Apam Pisang Gula Hangus in Malay). If I don't hide it, it will be gone from the table top in no time, and sometimes when there is just one lonely banana left, poor mummy has to play the mediator between 2 wailing kids.

Back to this special cake I bookmarked for trying out in my little Toshiba. I have bookmarked it for a long time ever since I saw it at Roz@Homekreation, and again at NasiLemakLover, so I decided to combine the 2 recipes, reduce the amount of ingredients to 3/4 to make it suitable for my 5.5 cup rice cooker. :)

This will be my 10th rice cooker cake to date and my 1st one for the Rice Cooker Cake Challenge event starting this month. If you are tired of me going gaga over rice cooker baking, then feel free to browse through my other bakes then. :)This cake is much more complicated than my easy "no cake-mixer, stir and mix" RCC #4 Rice Cooker Banana Cake. It requires making the caramel sugar syrup (which I had failed once and had to redo second time) and beating eggs with sugar in a bain marie until you achieve the ribbon stage. Tastewise, although I could taste the caramel flavour, I feel that it is less moist than my RCC #4. But it is very spongy and the texture is very similar to my RCC #7 Japanese Castella Cake, which also requires beating eggs with sugar until ribbon stage. Perhaps I should use large instead of medium eggs and increase the mashed bananas from 150g to 180g or even 200g for that extra punch of moist banana flavour. This cake was very well-received by my 2 guests yesterday evening, and there was only 1 piece left this morning. :)

[Important : I hope you enjoy this cake as much as I do, and I would be happy if you could give credit where credit is due, and link back to this post if you do make this cake and share it on your blog or facebook. Remember plagiarism is not the best form of flattery.]Recipe inspired by HomeKreation and NasiLemakLoverIngredients 75g castor sugar2 tbsp butter, about 28g

150g evaporated milk

2 medium eggs80g castor sugar (reduced sugar wrt original recipe)150g mashed bananas170g sifted plain flour3/4 tsp baking powder3/4 tsp baking soda1/8 tsp saltMethod1. Melt sugar in a saucepan over low/medium heat until the sugar melts and turns brown or caramelized. (This takes quite some time so pls be patient. On hindsight, I think I should add a little butter with the sugar at this stage so that they can turn brown faster. Then once the sugar has melted, add the remaining butter and evaporated milk as per step 2.)2. Add in butter and stir until it melts, then add in evaporated milk very slowly and mix well. Remove from heat, and stir until the sugar is completely dissolved. Set aside to cool.3. Using electric mixer, beat eggs and sugar in mixing bowl over a pot of hot water at medium heat until thick and pale (ribbon stage). This would take 5 to 7 min. You can beat for 5 min at medium speed and turn down to low speed for next 2 min. Ribbon stage is achieved when the batter continuously drips back into the bowl like a ribbon when you scoop it up.4. Add mashed bananas and caramelized sugar mixture from step 2 and mix briefly using manual whisk.5. Add sifted flour mixture (flour + BP + baking soda + salt) and use manual whisk to mix briefly until it is no longer lumpy. 6. Pour the batter into greased rice cooker pot and press "cook". Let it cook for +/- 1 hour. This recipe is also steamer-friendly, you can pour into a greased 8-inch round cake tin and steam in a steamer over medium heat for +/- 45 min. Note that I haven't tested the timing for steamer yet.

Notes:- I am using Toshiba RC10L-MI with 5.5 cup capacity. - I pressed the "Cook" button 3 times and took a total of 1 hour 3 min. (29 min + 18 min + 16 min).- The adapted recipe is 3/4 the original recipe and the amount of sugar was reduced to make it less sweet.

Lessons learnt:Making this cake was not exactly smooth-sailing, in fact I encountered some problems in making the caramel sugar syrup. The first time I was too impatient and I increased the heat to medium-high as it was taking far too long for the sugar to turn brownish. Finally when the sugar had turned brownish and liquid was oozing out, I added butter, and after the butter had melted, I quickly poured the evaporated milk at one go into the pot. Big mistake! It made a sizzling sound and the whole pot of caramel sugar syrup crackled and curdled quickly and turned into rock-hard caramel bits. It was so fast that it really caught me by surprise. (I will upload the step-by-step pictures of making the sugar syrup later.)I was disappointed but undeterred, and decided to try again since I had already come so far. Luckily i still had half a can of leftover evaporated milk. The second time round, I made sure I stuck to medium heat and watched the heat throughout, and as I poured the evaporated milk, I did it very slowly while stirring the pot of "gold" constantly. The second attempt was much better than the first, however there were still a few small lumps of hardened caramel bits. So I filtered them out of the brown liquid and weighed them on my scale, so that I could increase the amount of sugar accordingly with the egg yolks.I wonder why I failed in making the caramel sugar syrup because I succeeded in making peanut candy just a few months ago. Then I realise that with my peanut candy, I added 1 tbsp of water and 2 tbsp of white vinegar together with 50g sugar, maybe that explains why, because the vinegar was supposed to prevent the sugar syrup from crystallizing during heating.

Hi Ms B, just discovered your lovely blog and your rice cooker cake just caught my attention. I owned one of this rice cooker too which is still brand new keeping in my store. haha.... I'm sure one day, I'm going to try so many lovely stuffs with it. Thanks for sharing such wonderful post.Enjoy & have a great day.Blessings, Kristy

Hi Kristy,Thanks for dropping by! This is not the easiest rice cooker cake to attempt, there are 2 other cakes which are just stir and mix, such as RCC #4 and RCC #6. Hope you can try them out one day. If you do it this month, then you are just in time to participate in my Rice Cooker Cake Challenge #1. :)

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